Testing Non-Violence

OK remembered the ultimate test of non-violence from Tour of Duty series. The pacifist doctor is faced with the classic situation where he has a chance to shoot an enemy soldier before that soldier takes his comrades life. He stumles and his friend is killed. The enemy solder is then shot anyway... what did his pacifism achieve?

A biger example just to leave no doubt of the problem. Imagine that the enemy soldier had been heading toward a village of known innocent women and children to commit a massacre. After the masacre he was going to die anyway would we shoot him to save all those lives?

Traditional wisdom is actually a bit more complex, it runs like this: those women and children have more reason to live than the solider heading toward the massacre. Why people would ask should he live given that he is going to commit such a terrible action. After the massacre that turns into the argument he has no right to live given that all those good people just died at his hands. Leaving him alive feels like an insult to all those who died. They have lost their lives while he still has his - it is basically unfair and unjust. Probably simpler in terms of property: if someone takes money from everyone it seems that he has lost his right not to have it stolen off him. We steal it back Robin Hood style and feel justified. So in convential wisdom it is not just a matter of stopping him in his tracks, it is also a second layer where his desire to commit massacre means that he forfits his right to life himself. Both these end with him being "justly" shot.

A true pacifist has a hard problem here. However now I'm a bit clearer on this idea the solution is simple.

We lay down our weapon (if we are even carrying one). This is the 1st absolute imperative of Peace. We then have no choice but to approach the gunman, unarmed with hands above head and intervene. Now chances are we will be blown away and just add another body to the body count of the massacre. The reason however that this is not a problem is that the second argument above is invalid. The women and children do not have more right to live than the gunman! It sounds odd. The point is that the gunman is wrong to be bearing arms. In some ways the pacifist is being cruel in not shooting the gunman because he is allowing him to commit an action that will ultimately hurt the gunman far more. Dying is easy it won't take more than a day at most from mortal wounds. Trying to balance a mind that has commit an atrocity is virtually impossible. How can we know happiness in a mind that has experienced the hatred of violence? It is impossible. Such a person enshrines themselves inside a dungeon of unhappiness for a very, very long time with no way out! When the pacifist takes action it is to stop this type of suffering, not the death of the women and children: after all we struggle through to keep them alive and come back in a 100years and they are all gone anyway.

What is also worth bearing in mind is that the assmption that the pacifist will be blown away is important to assume, but it probably won't happen. The reason is that sacrifice is a very, very powerful weapon. The reason is where is the point in shooting someone who has evidently accepted death and who poses no threat? We shoot because we are either afraid or we are takng revenge for another death. There is no fear in someone who has submitted their life to you, and there is no debt for death when you see that someone can give their life away so cheaply. Sacrifice destroys violence. It uttely cuts the tree down. I have seen this to some extent myself when faced with dangerous people I offer my life - it wakes them up out of their hatred.

Now Tibet seems to challenge this argument. I thought even the Dalai Lama was questioing non-violence these days. I would say his weakness (if I should be so bold as to suggest he has one) was that his first premise was "Tibet". I don't know the history of Tibet but I assume that it arose like China from conflict. The Dalai Lama has been reborn to wield the hidden swords in his nation state. This is what has fuelled the hatred from China (which also has its hidden swords) and so there is violence without end. Tibet should submit to 'China' as Hero argues, exactly as China should submit to the U.S. - it is their argument ;-) Ah we see another weakness of the Hero (Violence) argument that it is great to submit to Chin (when you are Chinese) but not for the Chinese t submit to U.S. I should have put this in the last blog for it supports my suspicion that the Hero argument only really works retrospectivel after Chin made China not before.

This is another version of sacrifice. The Chinese (if they were really without violence) should submit to the U.S. and become Americans. Why would the Americans (converted Chinese) possible be annoyed at being American? Violence is all absurd when you look at it from a few angles.

So sadly the pacifist has to reconcile the massacre of the village in his world view. Pacifists have to accept that the world is a really bad place and that violence is truly horrific and that people will do obscene things to one another in the name of hatred. This is the way of the culture of violence. We cannot take up arms to stop it, only sacrifice on the cross of non-violence along side all the other innocents and know at least that we lived and rest in Peace and didn't live and rest in Violence.

11th Hour

Watched this yesterday – wished I had seen it ages ago would have saved me thinking out a load. It shows at least that a good deal of thought does exist in the right direction it just hasn’t seen made very popular.

Interesting ideas throughout. This was quite revealing:

The annual work done by nature was roughly estimated at $35 Trillion dollars compared with $18 Trillion done by humans. The only difference was that humans did all that work in an exchange system, while Nature did it all for free! Doesn’t this more than anything else throw a grenade into the concept of “exchange value” and “price”. It is like Structuralism arguing that nothing exists “outside” language because everything has to be communicated for “proof” – so you can’t by definition “prove” that anything exists outside language. I need to get that SRH sorted out after this wedding! The same is true with the paradigm of “price” they say how could anything be valued without an exchange system? We know perfectly well that it is, just it can’t be proven – though well done to the people who did the study in attempting to cross the boundary!

Thinking aloud: the way they did it was by asking how much it would cost for mankind to generate all the services that nature currently performs like fixing sun energy in plant material, bio waste breakdown, CO2 recycling, water recycling etc. I can’t believe it would not be more myself given that every heart beat would have to be performed by a human… SRH showing its head!

So maybe a similar question works for Structuralism and the SRH? Need a break from writing…

Non-Violence

Facebook comment quoted:

The non-violence paradigm isn't to do with other people, that is the violence paradigm - for example if other people behave well then so will I, if they pick up swords so will I... non-violence means that we never pick up a sword or even think like that. If we get killed this is bad, but better die peacefully than pick up a sword ourself and make things worse - that is how wars start and the whole cycle kicks off again leading to Chin and Nation states. In any case the only reason most (all) people pick up a sword is because they are taking revenge for some hurt they feel... hurt is hardly cured by picking up a sword ourself! The non-violence paradigm has to be personal choice. If we live in a society dominated by the violence paradigm (which we do) then it makes life hard to be peaceful but to those who see that fighting really is harder it is just a sad fact that must be endured. Hopefully people will see the peaceful way and make their own choices - but not while every politician, film, newspaper and knife carrying kid worships violence.

Was thinking again about Gandhi … think i commented before on him not really being an advocate of non-violence. I think I still agree with that. It is true that he didn’t pick up a sword but he still fought and it is what he fought for which lets him down. Basically he swapped white rulers for brown rulers. Now how absurd is that! This is the let down. How can you build non-violence on something that is basically hatred based on skin colour!! If not skin colour then he was gripped by the concept of “nation” which I’ll explain is based upon violence.

The Facebook discussion began with the film “Hero”. In a nutshell Emperor Chin unified the warring states in what became an empire named China after him. As far as I can see the argument is the same as Hobbes in Leviathon that in terrible war people eventually realise that endless attrition is worthless and they settle for being ruled. The cycle seems to be here that at first people pick up swords to be free, or to avenge death (as with the assassins) but when retribution comes from other people with swords it turns messy and everyone loses. Eventually everyone sees that endless retribution is self generating and the swords become internalised and the ruler can rule without violence (the film’s conclusion).

I saw something else though. I don’t accept “China” (or any Nation) as an axiom (after discussion held in this blog). “Nation” has to be explained which is what the film tries to do (and many political philosophers have). The argument here for China is based upon the assumption that people will fight without a mutual contract to keep the peace. Exactly the same as Hobbes’ state of nature “nasty, brutish and short”. It is as though people are cellular automata and follow the same solutions as game theory predicts. I know from watching that MIT course that people working in emergent properties are using game theory (solutions to prisoners dilemma, Nash equilibria etc) to understand and predict mass behaviour (a study started by the Nazis) and to evolve a new type of warfare (the Joint Vision 2010/20 US military stimuluses). Certainly these forces exist but the idea that humans behave as mass entities simply isn’t true. However this presupposes that humans have an element of socio-pathology – I met a borderline sociopath during the week and it got me thinking. If people who are averted to social interactions are considered to have a pathology, by symmetry isn’t there another pathology which is people who cannot separate themselves from social interactions? This is hard to understand given that “self” is constructed within society “us” – but a sociopath has a self that is Socially constructed! There are two levels of society – the true level that constructs even the mind of a sociopath and the superficial level of game theory based on individuals. My argument is that violence is a process that calculated on the superficial level between “egos”. But those egos that either do co-operate and are peaceful, or do not-co-operate and fight, are constructed within Society which is Peaceful because you can’t get outside!! So why the contract? Why the game play? So what if people just chose Peace in the first place before they started fighting?

Things to clear about with True Peace however is that it cannot be “enforced” and it can’t be punished – these are within the violence paradigm. Forces enforce peace through violence, nations work by violence because as pointed out in Hero the sword is still there it is just “not in hand or heart” anymore. We just need to look at Tibet to see the violence inherent in the concept of China. Indeed anyone who speaks in the language of “nation” speaks the language of war and violence. National authorities like the police are also the language of violence. It is totally obvious when you see the activity of police and armies they are the epitome of violence – this is one of those realisations that was always there under my nose but never saw it.

So what happens when you ignore the systems of violence? Well you don’t dismantle the systems of violence that is just remaining in the paradigm of violence. You simply ignore them. If everyone ignored them the systems of control and violence would naturally collapse. Mankind would experience much greater freedom and something like Heaven on Earth. Now according to game theory chances are that many individuals would fail to understand this and would be tempted toward greed, anger, jealousy etc. In a non-violent culture they would seem rather odd and presumably the culture would have its ways of dealing with these pathologies like talking them out and seeking personal balance again. If too many people at once started on the path of violence again it would simply lead back through the warring states period and back to Chin.

What is important to understand however is that individuals don’t have to get involved. The sociopaths who make up society (small ‘s’) the ones who get involved in politics, social climbing and war, these are the ones who make and break systems of control and these are the ones who seek peace. Those who seek True Peace don’t actually “do” anything because there is no such thing as Non-Peace. How can a power attack itself through entities built from that power! This is the SRH… In contrast to the version “How can beings attack the conditions for their own power” which is possible. The only way to identify them is that they don’t see any reason to use state apparatus and see any reason ever to inflict harm. True that people who think in the violence paradigm will exploit and hurt people in the non-violence paradigm, and non-violence individuals will seem to lose out in situations that violent individuals see as conflict situations – but this is only an illusion. In conflict someone has to die and non-violent individuals accept that it will be them – the argue that it should be someone else (the reason we pick up weapons and become skilled in swordsmanship like in “Hero”) is the essence of violence and all the compromises and loss of freedom that it entails.

Violent individuals really are absurd creatures. We fight to preserve ourselves. This leads to endless war so be accept a nation state in order to survive… and then we end up having to die for the nation state when it goes to war. If violent people were prepared to die for their country why didn’t they just do this at the outset and resist the temptation to arm themselves and start the “state of nature” which lead to the creation of contracts and nations in the first place!? And if we die fighting and the nation wins we have only maintained the status quo that arose out of wanting to survive the “state of nature” – in other words we were only fighting to enforce the solution to warfare in the first place – how absurd and twisted is that!

Other absurdities of the violent paradigm are present in the film “Hero”. The most powerful man in the ancient world Chin who controlled the largest empire spent his whole life living in fear of assassins. In other words he never enjoyed the ”peace” that he was supposed to have created. As Lao Tze was to point out later opposites stick together. The more powerful you are the weaker you are. Another irony was that for all his power he could not defeat Death and even went mad taking mercury remedies speeding up his death. His violent path in life certainly is not a model for anyone! If he wanted to live unhappily and die young why didn’t he sacrifice himself for True Peace rather in the creation of a Nation which has confused the minds of people for thousands of years. In the West we have Jesus as an even more powerful individual who did exactly that and left no Nation behind. The attempt to create Christendom is the most embarrassing interpretation of non-violence yet, a sign that the Western mindset is just as stupid as the Chinese. In both cases we have excellent examples of non-violence: Christ, Buddha and Lao-Tze (true he was a civil servant) and yet no-one understands them.

Thinking of Cake

 

It occurs to me yesterday that I am embedded in my own thoughts. I mean this is the sense that we get engrossed in a story or film and follow its narrative as it unfolds. Our perspective and horizons are closed down to the limits of the narrative so that it becomes a self contained universe. This is essential in a film for example because we could not accept the film as real and at the same time accept our sitting in an auditorium as real. At the same time we read a text and we either entertain the reality that we are reading a text, or we immerse in the “meaning” of the text, but not both at the same time.

This is identical to the issue of language and meta-language which Godel circumvented by introducing the numbering system so that “texts” could be referred to meaningfully within texts: isomorphism that provide correspondence between the substance of a text and the text itself.

Considering functions the other day I thought about that computing theorem which states that it is always possible to find a new program which takes a certain program as a parameter and computes the same results as that program: in other words an interpreter. This means there are at least 2 versions of every function that we can write. It means that the “result” of a function must be separated from the “implementation”. In that MIT lecture they showed that the Sierpinsky triangle could be generated by Linden-Mayerhoff diagrams as well as by Iterated Function Systems. There is no apparent similarity in method only in result. This means that one cannot explain an emergent property by the (computable) mechanism that created it. This is really why is it called emergent in the first place. So we immerse into the workings of a program or function (become a Turing computer i.e. someone who computes) and we start crunching through the rules of the system. We absorb into the narrative and close our horizons down to the limits of the system. The result and what emerges from our immersion however is quite different from that lower level of detail. To appreciate the result, indeed for a result to be distinguished from the system, for it to output, it must emerge from the system and be distinct from it. This is all present within the ideas of output and result before we even begin. This occurs because of context. A computer object will conceal as private its working and only make available, in accordance with a prescribed interface, certain values of its operation. These are deemed important to the outside. It is the outside which determined what the function outputs. Now this is the essence of one approach of the SRH that the inside cannot determine what it should be available on the outside of a function. Now Godel seems to have put the cat amongst the pigeons here by pointing out that separate the inside from the outside as much as you might try you cannot eliminate isomorphism and meaningful parallels between the two levels… something that the observant Godels among us can pick up on to show how inside and outside are not really separate. My argument here is that we still need the Godels amongst us to see these things: isomorphism don’t come out of the mix by themselves. So the Godels introduce a new level to the in/out systems: a level presumably which has its own in/out. I need to think this through still…

Linking to GEB (Godel, Esher, Bach) the inner message and the outer message are indeed separate. The outer message being the text or the code of the function and the inner message would be the meaning or the working of the function that we find when we immerse into. The pictures on the screen versus the story that is being told by those pictures. Vipassana Meditation in Buddhism specifically trains us not to get into the story being told so that we can see the pictures in their plain outer message way. The outer message is then the Truth and the inner message is the imagination that is an illusion. This I will investigate a bit further: my current understanding of sunyata (emptiness) is that the “form” or outer message is actually the illusion. An example being the bringing the components of a cake together and baking and being amazed at how this now delicious food came from what before was quite odd tasting. It is as though the cake has come out of nothing. We scientifically know the process that created it, like we know the processing of a computer function, but the result is an emergent property of that processing. Cake is not present in the original ingredients because if it was why do we need to make a cake? That refers to the blog on Making a few weeks ago. So the outer message is the illusion because it is quite separate from the ingredients. In Vipassana however it seems to be the other way around: the form is what we are sensing and the process is what we are thinking and so it is the illusion. This is Hegel’s view and that of Phenomenology for reference. Actually I see both views are the same. The point is that Cake is real. We eat it, we know it, we desire it. The process that creates it is something we learn and we imagine that it is happening. We don’t actually see it. Buddha uses cause and effect however to show us that that there is nothing in Cake that is not present in its ingredients to show us Voila! that the fixed form Cake (that we like) is empty and not itself “made” of something called Cake, but rather from things (we don’t like so much) called the ingredients. They are the same and our desires are for things that are ephemeral and substances less.

So returning to the start I realise that I am embedded in my thoughts. I find myself inside the story that my brain creates with all these words. Where I should try at will is outside these thoughts so that I do not take them to be too solid and Cake like!

Maybe this is the SRH. A function cannot identify its own output.

Adders 2010

Made a visit to Frensham Pond in Surrey on 24th April to see whether I could catch my first glimpse of an Adder in 25 years!!! I have looked for them on my walks but have never had the time to really track them down. I made a special effort to go to the right habitat and voila. Amazing. A male checking its territory I decided. I didn’t see any battling in the famous ‘adder dance’ so still have this to look for one lucky day.

 

 

 

 

 

They are fresh out of hibernation (late this year) and I saw two discarded skin sloughs too.

 

 

 

 

 

Also of interest was this Green Tiger Beetle… or actually many of them jumping all over the dry sandy soils of the heaths. I’ll be looking out for their grubs later in the year that lie buried in the sand in ambush.

 

 

Saw my first Brimstone of the year (very late) and heard my first cuckoo too.

No Algorithm to calculate Complexity

Can we find the shortest algorithm code to perform a task? This question seems to be behind most of what I’m trying to think out.

Is it possible to compute the shortest algorithm? Suppose we had an algorithm say a function: bool Optcpx(char* code) that returns TRUE if it is the shortest code and FALSE if there is a shorter code.

So we have some code that implements Optcpx() and we feed that into the Optcpx() algorithm to see if there is a shorter piece of code that performs the same function.

What Optcpx() has to do determine if there is any code that will do the same thing as itself and which takes up less memory. Here is Ouroboros and SRH problem seems to emerge!

Suppose Optcpx() returns FALSE. It means that there is a shorter piece of code that will also return FALSE when given this code as input. In other words the Optcpx() function needs to know that it will return FALSE before it has completed so that it knows that the other piece of code will also return FALSE. Put another way (this is not clear in my head yet) the code can’t determined whether another piece of code is functionally identical until it knows its own output, and if its own output depends upon the nature of another piece of code then it is stuck.

This assumes that you can only determine a codes “identity” from its output.

So Optcpx() can’t determine whether another piece of code is functionally equivalent to itself. Thus it can’t determine whether it is a larger or smaller piece of code to itself.

There is no way of computing the smallest algorithm for Optcpx().

Choice and Triviality

 

Where there is choice there is also triviality and arbitrariness. This is exactly the quality of the conditions of a formal system – there is no need for there to be any particular set of symbols. It occurs to me today as I continue to query sexuality that the very problem with “girls” is that there are so many. I saw at least 5 this morning that I would happily try things out with. “My Muse” is special, amongst other reasons, because she was a test of the notion of “true” love. It is important that I gave everything recklessly and with carefree abandon and acceptance of any future because I had to believe that she was “The One” and this entails that “what will be, will be”. Had I engineered even 1 spec of that structure, the whole thing would have become inauthentic and arbitrary. Had I ever “chosen” her then I could un-chose her, and I could chose any girl. Suddenly it all becomes arbitrary. This is what I fear about marriage realising that all those rules and vows are entirely arbitrary and have no foundation at all. We make the whole thing up.

But this is the truth isn’t it. We make all of existence up and then we forget we did it and become prisoners inside our own creation. We made marriage, if we neglect it then it disappears. The dream of “True Love” is an attempt to weave some necessary, essential quality into marriage to make is necessary and solid in some way. A security for those who become weak in their creation.

So to I see (and this was the main point here) does this reflect on the Free Market. We celebrate choice. But this freedom means arbitrariness and non-necessity. If the Left Wing have one argument with the Right it is over this feature of necessity. There are some things that are necessary, that we don’t chose. These therefore do not belong in the free market. This is where Capitalism as a paradigm has its limits… at the limits of choice. That which we don’t chose can’t be funded by private capital. That seems to be the rule. The problem is exactly what is necessary. I’ve recently argued here that there is no limit. We can (and do in time of war) chose death. So maybe we can extend the free-market to everything and realise our the trivial choice in create everything.